Barcamp Liverpool 2008 Official Logo

So… I’ve always meant to be a bit more active within the geek community.  I tried a spell in the late eighties/early nineties with the British Computer Society, CompuServe and CIX but sometimes found it all a bit tiresome.  There were too many who’d earned their stripes in the seventies on heavy iron and, I felt, even at that time were being left behind.  Of course, I must say that that doesn’t apply to all or even a majority of the people back then.  But there wasn’t much of a sense of fun.  It was all a bit… serious.

But you know, technology is cool.  Especially today when almost everyone seems to be a geek these days.  So after a successful trip to Birmingham for the first WordCamp UK I thought it was time to get geeking up in my home town!  Barcamp Liverpool beckoned…

And it was worthwhile.  Sadly I’d been up at 3am in the morning in order to take Romana to the airport, so I was a bit out of it.  But that didn’t prevent me doing a few things anyway…

WordPress for News Sites

I was asked if I wanted to do a presentation on WordPress by one guy.  And I thought… why the heck not.  Now, I know a lot of people at Barcamp know WordPress, so I felt the best approach was to be a little more specific.  So… I decided to talk casually in the Café about how WordPress can be used for the purpose of building a news site.  I covered the basics before showing off the Caribou demo.  To be honest, it wasn’t a perfect talk - I’d had half an hour to prepare and most of that was spent getting the latest WP Trunk installed on my laptop, with everything configured and ready to roll, plus a quick list of key points.  If I hadn’t had a client meeting for half the morning I might have done better.  But still, at one point there seemed to be about 20 people paying good attention.  Frankly I was surprised - I rambled and soon realised that the best approach was to get folk asking questions.  I think people enjoyed it!

Video Interviews

I ended up giving a couple.  I rambled.  I was tired.  Lack of sleep doesn’t help me.  I kept my glasses on so as to disguise the bags under my eyes.

1 Minute Pitch

Instead of pitching something we’re doing I decided to pitch a new concept we’ve been floating around the office.  I was nervous, shakey and tired.  I can’t even remember much about it all to be honest.  The other guys did better.  They had stuff like preparation - I’d had about thirty seconds to think about mine!  But it’s good to practice public speaking, so why not?  It was a good crowd.

But Hey…

I had a good time.  But overslept dramatically as I recovered from Saturday, so didn’t make the Sunday.  I hope everyone had a great time!

This post, really, is to see if it’s a success - does my blog here appear in my profile? And so it does! Woo! Another little click in the Web 2.0 thingy.

Now what I want to know is, does your feed show my posts come up? If so, then this all works very nicely indeed. I have ideas….

A recent example of this is one of my preferred Badminton Clubs’ website - my company builds websites professionally, so we’re not in the habit of giving them away. But these are custom jobs, for firms that need reliable websites which often generate far more money than they cost. But a small club doesn’t need the fine control of a commercial organisation. So I pointed Halton Badminton’s chief chap Bob Redmond, to wordpress.com and we spent a couple of hours together as I showed him the ropes.

And now the site’s there and the search engines will soon pick it up. Hopefully it’ll soon attract the traffic it deserves - these are great clubs for anyone interested in badminton around Widnes, Runcorn or St Helens - and a fair few folk from Warrington turn up as well. For more details head to http://haltonbadminton.wordpress.com

What happened was that many links and pictures, some placed in there by plugins, others simply links that were typed in, had failed.

I realised that although I’d followed the migration instructions, a lot of things were left poorly sorted. A quick run through of all the tables showed where values were left incorrectly set. To fix this I wrote the following SQL statements and applied them to my database:

update wp_posts set guid = replace(guid,”/wordpress”,”");

update wp_postmeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value,”/wordpress”,”");

update wp_options set option_value = replace(option_value,”/wordpress”,”");

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,”/wordpress”,”");

These worked a treat.

To use this yourself I’ve done a version below that you can edit - simply replace $$$olddir$$$ with your old directory name (in my case wordpress) and replace $$$newdir$$$ with your new directory name. If your new directory is the root, remove the / at the beginning of each $$$newdir$$$ - see my example above.

A couple of warnings though - first take a backup of your database! Then think carefully - if you don’t know what you’re doing you may well be advised in seeking someone out who does.
update wp_posts set guid = replace(guid,”/$$$olddir$$$”,”/$$$newdir$$$”);

update wp_postmeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value,”/$$$olddir$$$”,”$$$newdir$$$”);

update wp_options set option_value = replace(option_value,”/$$$olddir$$$”,”$$$newdir$$$”);

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,”/$$$olddir$$$”,”$$$newdir$$$”);

Good luck and have fun!